The first Russian privatization program represented the largest and fastest property reform ever undertaken in the modem world. This article, however, is not concerned with the quantity and speed of Russia's privatization program, but rather with the kind of privatization that occurred in the first round. Drawing on theories of path dependency, this article argues that the institutional legacy regarding property rights in the Soviet era influenced the course of privatization in post-Soviet Russia. Using a principal-agent model to illuminate the distribution of property rights in the Soviet era, this article first delineates the bundle of property rights that enterprise directors assumed during the Soviet period. The article then traces how these directors sought to protect their property rights during the Russian government's privatization program. To test this explanation, the article then analyses some empirical data from the first round of privatization, first in a discussion of the quantitative results of Russia's first privatization program, and second in a qualitative comparison of four case studies of privatization.
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September 1996
Research Article|
September 01 1996
The Allocation of Property Rights in Russia: The First Round Available to Purchase
Michael McFaul
Michael McFaul
Department of Political Science, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305- 2044, USA
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Research for this article was supported by the Project on Enterprise Restructuring at the Center for International Security and Arms Control at Stanford University, a project funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Eurasia Foundation. The author would like to thank David Bernstein, Susan Grubb, and two anonymous reviewers for comments on earlier drafts of this paper.
Communist and Post-Communist Studies (1996) 29 (3): 287–308.
Citation
Michael McFaul; The Allocation of Property Rights in Russia: The First Round. Communist and Post-Communist Studies 1 September 1996; 29 (3): 287–308. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/s0967-067X(96)000l2-8
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